An Expedition to
the Guaycura Nation
in the Californias

Chapter 5: The Guaycuran Language

The native languages of the Baja California peninsula have often been divided into
three families: the Yumans from San Javier north

, the
Guaycuras from Loreto down and including the La Paz area,
and the Pericú in the Cape region and the Gulf islands. But early missionary accounts
differ among themselves, as do modern scholars. William
Massey, the pioneering archaeologist of Baja California
Sur in recent times suggests, in fact, two families: the Yuman and the Guaycuran, and he divides the latter as follows: 1

Guaicurian Family

Guaicura
Guaicura
Callejue

Huchiti (Uchití)
Cora
Huchiti
Aripe
Periúe

Pericú
Pericú
Isleño

In this schema the testimony of P. Sigismundo Taraval played an important role. He
wrote

, as we saw, about
La Paz: "Comprising this mission were some 800
inhabitants who were scattered throughout seven rancherías, belonging to three main groups. One of these groups, which was related to the Indians of Mission Dolores, was that of the Callejues; another was the Huchitíes, which though reputed to be a branch of the Vaicuros yet speaks an
almost wholly distinct language; the other was a small ranchería on one of the
neighboring islands, belonging to the Pericúe nation.
The Huchitíes group included four rancherías: the Aripes, Coras, Periúes, or Vinees, and those who are called
by antonomasia the Huchitíes. These are the men that rose and, as will be related, started the
rebellion."2

But Massey

s classification of the Pericú being
part of the Guaycuran family rather than a separate one has been called into question.3
Don Laylander in a detailed review of the evidence,
relying particularly on Padre Ignacio Nápolis
account of the Cora, concluded that the Cora were, in fact, identical to the Pericú
and linguistically distinct from the Guaycura.4

Concerning our Guaycuran territory served by the missions of Los Dolores and San Luis
Gonzaga, historical testimony has been more straight-forward and consistent. These people
spoke Guaycura, which was the same language spoken by the Callejues in the south. But
there was considerable diversity in the Guaycuran family of languages. The Monquí to the
north at Liguí and Loreto appeared to have been Guaycuran speakers who spoke a tongue
quite distinct from the Guaycurans in the south. We can recall how Guillén on his 1719
expedition took interpreters with him, and he clearly marked the linguistic boundaries
between the Guaycura nation and the Monquí.

To the south of the Guaycura nation the Periué

, Aripe
and Uchití spoke Guaycuran languages which probably differed significantly from the
Guaycura to the north of them, and the Monquí. Miguel
Venegas will write, for example,"The people understand one
another only in some few words, which mean the same in
the three languages of Loreto, Guaycura, and Uchití, and those words are
very few."5 This kind of linguistic
diversity suggests either that the original Guaycura had been in Baja California for a
long time, or that different Guaycuran bands had
originally immigrated to the peninsula.

The Uchití

One Guaycuran tongue was spoken in the mission territory of Los Dolores and San Luis

, but there were some interesting anomalies. We saw how the Guillén
party on its way home from La Paz in 1721 encountered a ranchería whose people spoke Cora, and one old woman who spoke Guaycura,
as well, translated. If we accept Laylanders identification of Cora and Pericú,
then we can understand their presence as an indication that Pericú territory once
extended further north than La Paz, but was compressed
into the south by the arrival of the Guaycuras, leaving
this isolated pocket of Pericú speakers, as well as the
islands in the Gulf as far north at least to San José,
still part of Pericú territory. It is possible that the same kind of phenomenon might
account for the fact that the Cochimí territory extended south to San Javier, while the Guaycuras still lived to the west of it, and the Monquís to the east.

But there also appears to have been another non-Guaycuran speaking group in the
Magdalena Bay area. Hostell in his informe of 1744 had written about Titapue near
Magdalena Bay:

"The pagan Uchitíes dwell in this
area. The Ikas, Añudeves, and the natives from Ticudadei have joined them. The missionary found
all of them well disposed to listen to the holy Gospel,
as they informed him through the interpreter of their language, which is very different from Guaycuro."6 Ernest Burrus who translated this text felt that
Uchitíes was equivalent to the original Spanish text Huicipoeyes, and to Baegerts Utschipujes.7

Laylander suggests that Uchitíes is distinct from Huicipoeyes

, and that Ika and Añubeve are place names like Ticudadei, and therefore we might not be faced with a major language division,
but rather, a question of dialect. Guillén, for example, in his first expedition reports
an incident which took place on Magdalena Bay. Monroy and his party came upon an Indian
setting fire to a stand of mangroves: "he was caught by surprise and ran to hide
behind a mangrove. The interpreter spoke to him, and the Indian answered, his language not
being any other, I do not understand this language. They asked him about the water hole
and people, and he answered that here there are no people, I live here alone; nor is there
water and I do not drink it here."8 Surprise, fear, and a somewhat
different dialect rather than a distinct language could have come together to create this
situation.

But it is still a real possibility that we are dealing with a distinct linguistic
group. Place names in the Guaycura nation appeared to be named after the bands that lived
there

, or perhaps vice versa, so this kind of distinction does not rule out a group speaking a
different language. Hostell in his letter to his father of 1743, as we might remember, writes: "This coming October I shall attempt to find out whether two pagan
tribes, the Ikas and the Huchipoies, are ready to receive the gospel and are willing to accompany me
westward to the village which would be the fourth established by me. I have many reasons
to be optimistic in their regard."9 This
new mission was never created, as we saw, but perhaps part of the motivation for creating it was not only the
distance these natives lived from San Luis Gonzaga, but
conceivably a difference in language, as well. Elsewhere
Hostell writes: "My Guaycuro Indians alone make use
of four different dialects. The same is also true of other missions. As a matter of fact, it not rarely happens that in one household the husband speaks one
language and the wife another. Our older missionaries attribute this linguistic diversity
to the fact that new groups of natives repeatedly descended from the north, bringing with them these different languages."10

Baegert leaves us a general comment on the four languages of California beyond
Guaycura:

"These are the Laymóna (Monquí) in the
district of the mission of Loreto, the Cochimi in Mission
San Xavier, and other languages toward the north, the Uchitíes and the Pericúes in the south, and the still unknown language spoken by the tribe which Father Linck
visited on his trip."11 Then he reports: "My Ikas in California spoke a language different from the rest of the
people in my mission."12 It is
interesting to note that Baegert clearly distinguishes Guaycura from Uchití and Pericú.
So both Hostell and Baegert, who knew Guaycura well, claimed that the Ikas spoke a "different," or "very different," language. This leads us to the tentative conclusion that there was an
enclave of non-Guaycuran speakers in the area, or groups
that belong to the Guaycuran family but spoke a very different dialect. Lets see if we can refine this hypothesis.

Could they have been Pericú speakers isolated in that area like the Coras we saw
before? This does not appear likely because Hostell at the beginning of his missionary
career had spent two years at San José, and thus we would imagine he knew something of
the Pericú language and would have recognized it when he heard it. Taraval in describing
the rebellion in the south and how the Spaniards searched for them leaves us some very
interesting remarks that appear to throw light on this question. The Spaniards had been
searching all over for the rebels: "Inasmuch as they had gone out and made a complete
circle through the country of the Pericúes, had traveled overland from Dolores to La Paz
together with the soldiers and Yaqui Indian allies, had searched along the entire coast
bathed by the sea and gulf of the Californias at the time the commander went with the
Dolores Indians to Loreto, there remained of all the enemy country only the far coast,
that along the South Sea, which our men had not seen, traveled over, and passed through in
safety. This had been accomplished, too, without harm to the faithful, and always to the
damage of the unfaithful and the insurgents. Furthermore, the lands of this remote coast
were the ancestral lands of the Huchitíes and, according to reports, some of their
relatives still lived here. Certainly down near the shore stood a ranchería whose inmates
spoke the same language as did those at Mission Dolores."13 Taraval
concludes: "Then after they had inspected all this territory they planned to continue
on to Mission Dolores."14 It appears that the only way to made sense out
of this passage is to imagine them traveling north along the west coast toward the
Magdalena Bay area. Later the soldiers, for example, made another foray from Los Dolores,
itself, in which they encountered the Pecunes and Catauros halfway to La Paz who aided
them in killing the shaman of the Aripes, and we are told, "since they had explored
the coast along the straits, they returned by way of the South Sea and finally returned
safely to Dolores."15 So according to Taraval, the Uchití once lived in
the general area where Hostell encountered the Huicipoeyes speaking a very different
language, and therefore it may be that Burrus was correct in thinking that the
Huicipoeyes, and Baegerts Utschipujes, were equivalent to the Uchití. This would
fit with Taraval claiming that the Uchití were a branch of the Guaycurans and spoke a
very different language from them. Then it is possible that the Uchitís gradually moved
further south, leaving some scattered bands of Uchití speakers in the Magdalena Bay area.

The Cubí

Guillén

, himself,
leaves us two terminological riddles. In the first he tells us when he traveled south of
Liguí on his expedition to La Paz,"Here the territory of the Guaycura,
or Cuvé, nation begins."16 It seems that this name might have been used as an
equivalent for the Guaycuras as a whole. Or less likely,
it might have referred to a ranchería, and while there
is no Cuvé ranchería that has come down to us, there is
an Acuré. The word Cuvé, itself, does not seem to appear elsewhere.

The second riddle is more complicated and revealing. Members of the Guillén party to
La Paz explored to the southeast

, and came upon a
temporary camp whose inhabitants fled, so "they did not know if the people were Guaycuras or Cubíes."17 The implication is clear that Guaycuras are not Cubíes.

In a second incident we just looked at

, on their
return home from La Paz they came upon a ranchería where the people spoke Cora,"who our friends, Cubíes did not understand. However,
the old woman, it appears, called to them in their language. The woman also knew the Guaycura
language because she spoke well with our men."18The old woman speaks Cora to the people in the hills who the Cubíes cannot
understand, and speaks Guaycura, as well. Are there three languages involved here, or two?
That is the question. We saw that Cora could be Pericú, but there might be two other
languages involved here: Cubí and Guaycura. Guillén had Cubí in his party for
the return trip, and may have recruited them from the southeast of La Paz to fill the
places left vacant by his Indian allies who had returned north by boat. In regard to the
incident southeast of La Paz, M. León-Portilla suggests that the Cubíes could be related
to the Uchití who lived in that area.19

In a third incident

, the day after leaving the Cora
ranchería, the explorers arrived at a place they called
San Higinio del Guaycuro where they found just two women and some children. And Guillén
writes: "We found a ranchería of Guaycuras or
Cubíes."20 It is not likely that, given the previous usage, Cubí was
being used here simply as another name for Guaycuras, and
so it opens up the possibility that Cubí could be living this far north of La Paz, that is, in the area of present-day
San Hilario.

The Cubí show up in one other document

, Guilléns 1730 informe addressed to Joseph Echeverría where they dominate
much of the text. "Your Reverence," Guillén begins,"has already well experienced how barbarous and murderous are this
Cubí people (gente Cubí). They have already dared to kill those of the otra banda
(i.e., the west coast) as you just saw." They fight among themselves, and the
Cubí "of that part" are responsible for the deaths of the fathers of the seven mission
boys. They have finished off one ranchería, as they did
with San Carlos, and tried to do with others. "They are great thieves, and harmful
to our people ""For the barbarousness, then, of these Cubíes Indians is distinct from those of the north of this
land, and at one accord,
or half in accord, with the La Paz mission. The poverty
of this mission prevents them from being called there often, and only a few visits are possible to so many and so distant
rancherías." Later,
in the same document, Guillén writes: "Beyond the 20 rancherías that belong to the mission and those of the
mission of La Paz, this Cubí nation has as many
rancherías, a few more or less, which can belong to none of these missions; for they are very distant
and distinct among themselves. The 20 previously mentioned alone can pertain to the
mission, and if all were reduced, would number 1,300 or 1,400 people, and the mission
would have a lot of work in administering to them."

It appears that the Cubí should be taken as part of Guilléns own mission territory, but not be
identified with the Guaycuras. They seem to represent a rather distinct group of as yet
unevangelized rancherías. It is likely that these Cubí were related to the Uchití found
to the southeast of La Paz, and may have even spoken a
Uchití dialect. Later, in a letter Guillén wrote on
April 16, 1739, he tells
us he had received a letter from the south about the disobedience of the Uchití and the
Cora, indicating that he knows the Uchití under their
usual name, and strengthening our feeling that they are
in some way distinct from the Cubí.

It is worth trying to fit these remarks about the Cubí into the context of the better
known history of the Uchití at this time. We read, for
example,"The
fierce and defiant Uchití continued to harass all those around them. Capitán Rodríguez
and some eight to ten soldiers spent six months, from
March to September of 1729 trying to pacify the Uchití and protect the neophytes of La
Paz, Todos Santos, and
Santiago."21

In 1730, Venegas tells us, Capitán Rodríguez accompanied P. Visitador Joseph Echeverría on
his rounds of visiting the missions in the south, and of
founding S. Joseph, and the captain "visited all the missions in the south in order to pacify their
inhabitants." But it was still necessary to return
in 1731 to punish "certain rancherías who had acted
treacherously against their Christian neighbors."22
Venegas goes on to explain that these were the gentile inhabitants of the sierra on the
contra-costa, and neighbors (confinantes) to the
Christians of mission Los Dolores. Due to an ancient offense, they sought vengeance by pretending to be very friendly with their
Christian neighbors (vecinos), and invited them to a
feast and dance, as rancherías were accustomed to do
with each other. While the Christians were dancing, their
host loosed on them "a rain of arrows, darts and stones," killing 10
of them while the rest of the wounded and maltreated returned to the mission.23
The captain sent his alférez with 14 soldiers and 15 Indian warriors from Loreto and Los
Dolores to punish them. But they had difficulty finding them in such rough country. But
with the aid of their Indian allies they captured some of them who were brought to Loreto
for punishment.24

While we could suppose, as we could do with the
accounts of Taraval, that these Uchití were living along
the Pacific Coast of the Cape region, the link to Los
Dolores seems to imply a closer locality for some of them. Venegas clearly indicates that
they were the neighbors to the Los Dolores rancherías,
and this makes more sense than imagining the Los Dolores Indians taking a long trek to the
Cape region in order to attend a fiesta. The story also implies that the language
differences between the Guaycuras and these Uchití could not have been so great as to
have precluded these kinds of festivities.

It is becoming easier and easier to imagine that the Cubí of Guilléns informe are part of the Uchití,
and while there is no need to deny the Uchití inhabited a territory between La Paz and
Todos Santos, and on to the Pacific Cape region, we are faced with the intriguing possibility that related groups
existed north of La Paz, perhaps both on the west coast
and on the east coast. "Close relationship between
the Uchiti tribes at La Paz and to the north,"
William Massey writes,"is indicated by marriage of Aripe women to Periúes. Periúes, Tepajiguetamas, Vinees, Cantiles: The natives of La Paz referred to the Indians living to
the north as the Periúes, or as the Tepajiquetamas, Vinees, or Cantiles. The last name
is derived from steep cliffs in the land of the Periúes. Inasmuch as Taraval lists the
Periúes as a Huchiti rancheria, all these groups may be
taken as Huchiti bands living beyond the great escarpment northwest of La Paz Bay. When
Venegas (and later Clavigero) spoke of "Uchities" who were particularly troublesome in cutting land communication
between La Paz and Loreto, he undoubtedly referred to
these Huchiti-speaking groups."25

If the Cantiles were Uchití, or Cubí, then it would be more understandable how they could have attacked San
Carlos, as Guillén tells us in his 1730 informe, which was further north on the Gulf coast, rather than having to travel up from the Cape region. In regard to
the marriage of the Aripe women to the Periúe men, we
can recall Hostells remark that sometimes husbands
and wives spoke different languages, and it may refer to
this variation in dialect among different Guaycura bands. The author of Descripción
tells us that the Callejúes, Aripes, and Uchití all speak one language,"although it varies in some and many words by which one can be
distinguished from the other, but they understand each
other."26 It is in this way we can
understand the incident of the Guaycuras of Los Dolores,
who spoke the same language as the Callejues, going to
the festival of the Uchití, and understanding them. We
are also told that the Periúes speak the language of Los Dolores.27 These
appear to be the same people who Rodríguez called the Pirús, or Piruchas.28

There is a final interesting postscript to this Uchití connection with the Guaycura
nation. Guillén, as we saw before, when he retired to Loreto learned another language to help an old
woman who could not return home. This language, we are
told elsewhere,29 was Uchití. Miguel del
Barco tells us that about this time the Uchití were almost completely wiped out.30
This would account for why she could not return home, and
was isolated in Loreto among the Cochimí speakers and perhaps some Monquí who were now
conversing in Spanish. Could it be that she was a Uchití speaker from the west coast of
his original mission territory, and therefore he had a
special feeling of solicitude for her? His learning of Uchití would have followed his
original path of learning Monquí, then Guaycura, and finally another distinct dialect of the Guaycuran language.

In summary, it appears we have three basic language
families: the Yuman starting with the Cochimí, the
Guaycura, and the Pericú. Guaycura, in turn, can be divided into the
Guaycura of San Luis and Los Dolores, Monquí to the
north, and Uchití to the south. The Uchití are probably
related closely to Guilléns Cubí, and perhaps to Baegerts Ikas, as well. The Guaycura nation, then, was not linguistically uniform. It appears that there were Uchití
speakers on both coasts. See Map 6.

The Guaycura Language

Most of what we know of the Guaycura language of Los Dolores and San Luis comes from
Baegerts letters to his brother, and from his book on Baja California. He was also apparently planning
to write a more extensive linguistic study which Padre Visitador José de Utrera described
as "a grammar and vocabulary of this language which
is spoken here and in La Pasión and in Todos Santos."31 If he ever did so, it
might have been left behind at the time of the expulsion,
confiscated in Havana before the Jesuits set sail for Spain, or was used by Baegert for the study of Guaycura he leaves us in his
book, and now lies unnoticed in some European archive.
But he did, in fact,
leave us the Lords prayer in Guaycura, as well as twelve articles of the Creed, the conjugation of the verb "to
play," and various grammatical rules and reflections
on the language. He also tells us: "I have also
translated almost alone without help the entire Christian dogma on five sheets containing
35 paragraphs,"32 which is unfortunately
lost.

Baegert leaves us a basic description of the Guaycura language. The alphabet does not
have o, f, g, l, x, z, h, u, or s except for tsh.
The language contains no abstract nouns like life, or
death, or hope, or
charity.33 But if "life" is absent,"alive" is present. It has only
three or four adjectives that describe facial emotions: merry, sad, tired, and angry. Bad is expressed by adding the negation ja, or ra to good. There are words for old man and old woman, but not old and young by themselves. There are only four words for
color, and the Guaycura do not distinguish yellow from
red, blue from green,
black from brown, or white from ash-colored. Neither do
they have names for separate parts of the body. They dont say father or mother, but rather, my father or your mother. There is a dearth of propositions, conjunctions and relative pronouns,
and the conjunction "and" is placed at the end of a sentence. They lack comparatives and
superlatives, and most adverbs. They have no conjunctive, imperative, and almost no optative
mood for their verbs, yet Baegert gives an imperative
when conjugating "to play." They have no passive or reciprocal verbs. They conjugate their verbs
for the present, past or future, and sometimes have a preterit passive participle. Baegert leaves us
this information with the air of someone proving that the language was extremely primitive, yet he, himself, tells us how inventive the Indians were in creating new words. Wine
was evil water, and missionary, the one who has his house in the north. He even amuses us by having
us imagine a missionary giving them a sermon about a European saint who did not eat meat
or drink wine, and slept on the ground, a sermon, he assures us, they would find incomprehensible because they dont drink wine, rarely get any meat to
eat, and habitually sleep on the ground.

Map 6. Tribes and Languages

A Guaycura Vocabulary

If we add to Baegerts work Clemente Guilléns trip journals and reports, and a
few odd words from elsewhere, we can come up with a
Guaycuran word list. In this connection, a valuable aid
for Guaycura words and the words that still exist in Cochimí and Pericú is Gilberto
Ibarra Riveras Vocablos indígenas de Baja
California. L= Baegerts Letters. O=his Observations.
V=Vocablos. Most words when not otherwise noted come from the language section of
Baegerts Observations, and most of the unsourced place names come from Guillén.

Among indigenous personal names we find Alonzo Tepahui and Juan and Nicolás Eguí
which may be Guaycuran or Monquí. Various word elements appear over and over in the list
of place names.34 Tañuetiá is the place of the ducks, so conceivably some of these endings mean "the place of." Aena means above, and by extension, heaven. Aenatá is
the native name for present-day Jesús María and could conceivably mean "the place above," that is, the place in the far northern part of the Guaycuran territory. Even
the name Guaycura, according to Venegas, is not their own, but the name the
Pericú gave them meaning friends.35 Edú is,
according to Barco, the name given to the Monquí by the
Cochimí, and it means people of another tongue, but Venegas tells us it is the name given by the Monquí to those
further south. During Francisco Ortegas voyage of
1632 the Spaniards coming from the mainland hit the Gulf coast eight days coasting above
the Cape. There Diego de la Nava reports on an incident in which he held out his hands in
peace, and the natives said,"Utere, utere," which he took to
mean,"sit down," or something similar." And in return for the gifts he was
carrying, they said, "payro," putting their hands on their breasts and
inclining their heads, so he took that to mean thanks. This far north we could very well
be dealing with the Guaycura rather than the Pericú. If that is true, then payro would be
thanks, and perhaps utere is sit down, but it finds an interesting parallel with uteurí,
meaning give, i.e., perhaps in the sense of give us the gifts you are carrying.

The Origin of the Guaycura Language

In 1966, Karl-Heinz Gursky suggested that Guaycura was
a member of the Hokan language family. He gave a number of parallels to other
Hokan-Coahuiltecan languages to support this assertion. Among the most obvious: alive in
Guaycuran is tipé, while in Yuma it is ipay
(to be alive), and in Coahuilteco it is tepyam.
Alone, which is ibe in Guaycura, is ipa in proto-Hokan. Arched earth, which is tekerekádatembá in Guaycura, is tekerakwa (háka tekerákwa) for arched, or curved lake in Yavapay. Ambúja, meaning house, or week, in Guaycura is amma in Shasta,
and ama in proto-Hokan. Piabake, which
means fight in Guaycura, is payiwak (beat) in
Comecrudo. And house in Guaycura,ápa, is awa in Chimariko,
Diegueño, and in proto-Hokan, and ava in Mohave, as well as
Yuma.36

"Additional comparisons of Gurskys list," writes Laylander,"with more recently published
data on the Yuman languages and on proto-Yuman and Cochimí do not add materially to the
similarities already found by Gursky. It seems fair to conclude that the available
evidence is sufficient to show that no relationship between Guaycura and either the
Cochimí or the Yuman family exists which is as close as the relationship between the two
latter groups."37

In 1967 Morris Swadesh, apparently independently, reached conclusions similar to Gursky by comparing Guaycura with the
Coahuiltecan languages. Among the more obvious comparisons he made: I, which is be in Guaycura, is ne
in Nahua; tey (you) in Guaycura is te in Nahua; the negative ending ra
in Guaycura is sa in Cotoname, and apanne
(big) in Guaycura is penne in Jicaque. Swadesh felt that Guaycura had separated
from the other Coahuiltecan languages somewhere around 5,000
years ago.38